PETERBOROUGH, Ont. — When two Quebec MPs defected from major political parties to launch the upstart Forces et Démocratie party last fall, they vowed to stand against the centralized power of Ottawa in support of Quebec’s regions, which have been “forgotten, overlooked, or even clearly despised.”

Funny then, that as the campaign kicks off, their most prominent new candidate is a political rookie grad student who grew up in Toronto, speaks only basic French, and is pitching for Forces et Démocratie in central Ontario farming country.

Toban Leckie, 30, a self-employed contractor and wilderness guide outside his studies on indigenous culture, is carrying the party’s blue and green standard into the campaign for Peterborough-Kawartha. What he lacks in money and organizational support, he will make up in freedom from the scripted messaging that burdens his blue, red, orange and green competitors.

In an interview, he said Canada’s main parties are building platforms in closed strategy sessions, then selling them to voters, without even consulting the people whose problems they aim to solve. His party, known in English as Strength in Democracy, is not the first to take this populist tack, but with its awkward sovereigntist roots, it faces steeper odds than most.

‘They wanted better representation from Ottawa’

Its efforts are doubly quixotic outside Quebec in deepest anglo Ontario, where Leckie is trying to build on the network of engaged citizens he developed in the classrooms of Peterborough’s Trent University. It faces a similarly uphill climb in the Newfoundland riding of Avalon, where Jennifer McCreath is running for the party as the second openly transgender federal candidate (after Micheline Montreuil). The party’s half-dozen other candidates announced so far are all in Quebec.

Forces et Démocratie was created last year when a splinter of the Bloc Québécois, which was devastated in the 2011 election, allied with a splinter of the New Democratic Party, which was given new life.

The leader, Jean-François Fortin, MP for Haute-Gaspésie-La Mitis-Matane-Matapédia, once sought leadership of the Bloc and represents sovereigntist heartland on the Gaspé Peninsula, though the new party is not pursuing a separatist agenda. The other, Jean-François Larose, represents the Montreal suburb of Repentigny. Both are thought to have jumped ship because of their declining personal prospects, and the new party has been described as their life raft.

Forces et Démocratie does, however, represent the proud Canadian tradition of disrupting traditional party politics.

Laura Pedersen/National PostToban Leckie, of the Strength in Democracy party, says Canada’s main parties are building platforms in closed strategy sessions, then selling them to voters, without even consulting the people whose problems they aim to solve.

Alain-G. Gagnon, Canada Research Chair in Quebec and Canadian Studies at the Université du Québec à Montréal, said its electoral fortunes are likely pretty grim, with only Fortin facing decent odds, but its origin story recalls that of Preston Manning’s Reform Party, a tributary of the governing Conservative party, with its early focus on growing policy from grassroots, rather than plotting it in the boardroom.

Although its politics and scale are similar, Strength in Democracy is unlike, for example, the Bridge Party of Canada, another startup launched and led by former Walrus magazine editor David Berlin, who previously ran as NDP. That was a creation ex nihilo, one man’s political dream brought to life in a single riding. Strength in Democracy, on the other hand, is at least an existing political alliance that aims eventually to run candidates everywhere as a real national option.

It has a long way to go, but those grassroots ideals infuse Leckie’s plucky campaign, which has a dramatic origin story of its own.

Three years ago, a search party of Dene people from Deline on Great Bear Lake, N.W.T., out looking for a missing girl, came across canoeists travelling upstream, heading for the Barrens, guided by Leckie.

The chance meeting, in which surprised hellos led to a grand feast of welcome, inspired Leckie’s master’s thesis on adventure tourism, and a successful N.W.T. government program to promote Deline’s culture to tourists. Indirectly, it pushed Leckie toward his unusual candidacy.

David Kawai/Postmedia Network/FileQuebec MP Jean-François Fortin is the leader and co-founder of the Forces et Démocratie party.

As a northern wilderness trip guide with a philosophy of science degree, he has seen firsthand why Western science is increasingly open to the concept of traditional indigenous knowledge, gathered on the ground, not in the lab. He thinks Canadian politics is in a similar flux, straining under centralized doctrinaire leadership, losing touch with voters, like a wilderness traveller who fails to consult with the people who actually live on the land.

“We’re getting it the wrong way around,” Leckie said, praising the virtue of admitting uncertainty on policy questions, so as to invite the wisdom of the voting crowds. “The process is critical to the project.”

For the Peterborough-Kawartha campaign, the total absence of local history created an exciting opportunity in political branding — ironically, given Leckie’s fundamental objection to the branded policy of the big three parties that so often turns MPs into script reciters.

This rigid style of communication is disrespectful to voters, he said. “It’s just not a human approach to actually relating to people.”

Leckie, on the other hand, is quick with a pointed quip at his own expense, at times to the baffled exasperation of his campaign manager, as when he pointed out the word “force,” as in “Forces et Démocratie,” has different connotations in English, such that “Force and Democracy” would have sounded a bit “fascist.”

‘It did not make me sympathetic to the separatist cause, but it helped me understand it’

Nor is “Strength and Democracy” really the point. The word “strength” lacks the sense of purpose in the French word “force.” Thus the compromise translation of “Strength in Democracy,” less literal but more accurate.

Inspired by the writings of Donald Savoie in Governing From The Centre and Susan Delacourt in Shopping For Votes, Leckie said his political ambitions started with the idea to create a new party of his own, devoted to the principle of effective and transparent local representation, rather than centralized messaging and whipped voting.

He remembers being distressed, for example, to hear Gerard Kennedy, the former Liberal Party of Canada leadership candidate, speak on some policy that did not work for his Toronto riding of Parkdale-High Park, where Leckie grew up.

“You could hear him trying to sell it,” he said.

So when his campaign manager, Kristopher Millett, a classmate with whom he has an easy intellectual rapport developed over a seminar table, learned of an opportunity to run with this new party, they headed to Ottawa to meet the leadership.

“We were selling each other on each other,” Leckie said of the party, which announced him recently as its first candidate outside Quebec.

The riding of Peterborough (now Peterborough-Kawartha, with slightly different boundaries) is a classic bellwether that has sided with Canada’s governing party since 1980. Until recently it was represented by the Conservative Dean Del Mastro, who has been sentenced to jail for cheating on campaign spending, so the fall vote will technically be a byelection.

Peterborough, the urban heart of a riding that includes mixed agricultural and cottage country, is a long way from Chicoutimi in Quebec’s Saguenay region, where Leckie recently spent some time learning French. But both have similar problems, including poverty, industrial decline, and the loss of young people to job opportunities away. He said the experience opened his eyes to the frustrations of people who do not feel adequately championed by their elected officials, who march to the tune of Ottawa mandarins.

“What I started to distil was that they wanted better representation from Ottawa,” Leckie said. “It did not make me sympathetic to the separatist cause, but it helped me understand it.”

So his candidacy in Peterborough is more idealist than naive, although he accepts both descriptions.

As he tells it, the Liberal Jean Chrétien laid the groundwork for the centralization of power that has been intensified by the Conservative Stephen Harper. If it is naive to try something new after so long, so be it. Leckie is not seeking a protest vote, motivated by disgust or resentment.

Unlike the Democrats, the long list of aspiring Republican presidential candidates is a study in political forgiveness.

Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor, deliberately caused a traffic jam out of spite. Fellow governor Rick Perry of Texas, who once forgot major parts of his own presidential platform, is in the game. Former senator Rick Santorum, who compared homosexuality to bestiality, and current senator Ted Cruz, who was born in Canada, are plausible challengers. Then there is businessman Donald Trump, mocked and criticized, and enjoying an early lead in polls.

But that is the American right wing. The modern American left is different, more sensitive, more judgmental of its own champions, and it brandished those virtues fiercely, as the events of the past week have revealed. The American right seems reluctant to eat its own, but the left is positively voracious.

This has been shown in a “feedback loop of criticism of candidates on the Democratic side,” said Jennifer Stromer-Galley, a political communications scholar at Syracuse University, in New York state, and author of Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age. “That pile-on is not new, but it’s amplified with social media. It’s magnified because there are so many voices. Negative begets negative.”

Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont, who was once arrested for protesting for civil rights, learned this the hard way during a speech to progressives: he was shouted down and accused of “whitesplaining” racism to black people, a term that plays off the condescending “mansplaining” of sexism by men to women.

“Black lives of course matter,” Sanders said, in discussing police violence against blacks and the broader issues of structural racism. “But I’ve spent 50 years of my life fighting for civil rights. If you don’t want me to be here, that’s OK.”

He was then mocked on Twitter with the hashtag #BernieSoBlack. “Bernie so black he’s Rachel Dolezal’s grandfather,” one read.

Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland, who fought for gay marriage and gun control, got it worse at the same conference.

“Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter,” he said. He was booed, and later apologized.

“That was a mistake on my part and I meant no disrespect,” he said. “I did not mean to be insensitive in any way or communicate that I did not understand the tremendous passion, commitment and feeling and depth of feeling that all of us should be attaching to this issue.”

“Republicans don’t have that same kind of problem,” Stromer-Galley said, because activists in the Republican party are more concerned about abortion, guns, economic issues and religious freedom. “Their scrutiny is different”

The Democrat list is short, centred on the perceived inevitability of Hillary Clinton. In a field like this, second-tier candidates are almost seen as a “nuisance,” detracting from party unity, said Christopher Arterton, professor of political management at George Washington University in Washington.

Within certain activist wings of the party, there is also a hint of “buyer’s remorse” about Barack Obama, a sense that his presidency has not lived up to expectations, that Clinton would have done better, and that her success as secretary of state should make her the Democrats’ unchallenged standard bearer in 2016.

Clinton is the “recipient of that benefit of the doubt,” Arterton said, and it looms over her challengers like a storm cloud. “Competition tends to flower in the out party.”

He observed that the current long Republican slate looks a lot like the Democratic slate in 1976, 1984, 1988 and 1992, when big Democratic fields rose against a Republican in White House. But the current Democratic slate is narrow and, given that the party already holds the White House, everyone has more to lose.

Take one for the team, Democratic activists seem to be saying, or else the team will make you.

For political movements, this is known as eating your own, after the observation by the French essayist Jacques Mallet du Pan that the French Revolution devours its children.

His famous quip drew a link to Saturn, or Cronus in the earlier Greek, a Titan who overthrew his father Uranus and, fearing he was destined for the same treatment from his own sons, ate them as soon as they were born. But his wife tricked him to save their sixth son, Zeus, who eventually fulfilled the prophecy.

The Democrats display similar family dynamics. As Ryan Lizza wrote last year in The New Yorker, “the history of Democratic primaries suggests that an insurgent can’t expect to gain recognition with only a fresh face and a superior organization. Inevitably, the candidate must attack the front-runner from the left.”

The problem, for an insecure party seeking to hold on to power, is that this kind of candidate is more likely to become lunch than president.

Eleazar Noriega, a repeat sex abuser of vulnerable girls, has finally been stripped of his medical licence for molesting a teenager in 1979 at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children.

The decision of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario marks the long-overdue end to a career marked by “disgraceful” abuse of his patients, a criminal trial for sex assault at which he was acquitted, multiple complaints of sex abuse under the guise of medical examinations, a 2003 finding of sexual abuse in a plea deal that spared his licence, and repeated flouting of conditions on his practice designed to protect patients.

Noriega, 70, who immigrated from Mexico in 1977, ran a family practice that served many families who speak only Spanish.

HandoutMargaret Cook’s 1946 murder was one of four killings that sparked rumours of a “Soho Jack,” a central London version of Jack the Ripper.

The United Kingdom is trying to extradite a 91-year-old Ontario man who has reportedly confessed to murdering a prostitute 70 years ago in London’s trendy Soho district, then a seedy quarter of brothels and bars.

The unsolved murder of Margaret Cook in November, 1946, was one of four killings that sparked rumours of a “Soho Jack,” a central London version of Jack the Ripper, who had stalked prostitutes in the city’s eastern slums 60 years earlier. Police, however, suspected Cook was killed on orders of gangster pimps as a warning to other women to pay their cut.

The truth may be more mundane but no less shocking; that a man shot her in a dispute over payment for sexual services, kept the secret for a lifetime as he raised a family in Canada, then was driven by guilt to walk into an Ontario police station and confess to murdering a woman whose name he could not even remember.

This story, published Thursday in the Sun newspaper in Britain, does not name the man who reportedly confessed, nor any sources, but it describes the extradition efforts in detail. It reports the request was filed last year, with personal approval by Alison Saunders, Director of Public Prosecutions for England and Wales.

Canadian authorities would not confirm the request, nor the Sun’s unattributed claim that Canada is reluctant to agree to the extradition “because of his age and the mitigating factor that without his confession, nobody would ever have been any the wiser.”

“Extradition requests are confidential state-to-state communications, so the Government of Canada cannot confirm or deny the existence of such a request,” said Ian McLeod, a Department of Justice spokesman.

Margaret Cook, then 26, was born Margaret Willis in the northern textile hub of Bradford, and lived several miles west of Soho, where she worked at the Blue Lagoon club as an exotic dancer. She had served a sentence in a borstal, a juvenile jail, and the investigation of her murder was complicated by the fact she used several names.

‘Get on your way, chum, this has nothing to do with you’

The location of the killing, on Carnaby Street in Soho, would later become famous as a fashion hub in the Sixties. The Beatles and Rolling Stones played shows in the building that once housed the Blue Lagoon, which is now a men’s clothing store, and the district has become an upscale shopping and entertainment area.

In the 1940s and for many years after, however, it was London’s seedy underbelly, and the Blue Lagoon was notorious as a front for prostitution. An Associated Press report at the time described Soho as a “region of street vendors, restaurants and foreigners.”

A press report at the time said the shooting of Cook “took place in a narrow passage between a bricked-up emergency water tank and the door of a club.”

In his book, The Murder Room, about violence in London’s underworld, Donald Thomas wrote that a former policeman noticed a couple arguing, and the woman shouted, “This man has got a gun!”

But the man said, “Get on your way, chum, this has nothing to do with you.”

Three people chased the shooter but lost him in a crowd. He was described as 25 to 30, about 5-foot-8 with a dark complexion, wearing a raincoat and a pork-pie hat.

Scotland Yard named a suspect soon after, Robert Currie Wilson, but the Sun reports this is not the man in Canada.

Octagon/WikipediaLondon's Soho district is trendy now, but once was a seedy quarter of brothels and bars.

The Sun story, by crime editor Mike Sullivan, reports the confessed shooter, a war veteran, left the U.K. five years after the murder and married and raised a family in Ontario. He became a Canadian citizen and reportedly now lives in a care home.

The confession seems to have been prompted by a skin cancer diagnosis. The Sun quoted an unnamed source: “He is not in good physical health, but is mentally alert. He wanted to clear his conscience before he dies.”

The man told Canadian police he could not remember the victim’s name, but that he shot her with a Russian-made World War II pistol, in a dispute over money. British detectives came to interview him, and apparently believed him after he picked Cook’s picture out of a lineup of photos of similar women of the historical period.

The U.K. has abolished capital punishment, but it would have applied at the time.

There is a police file on the unsolved murder at the U.K. National Archives, due to be released publicly in 2024, unless the British courts get to try the case first.

Chiheb Esseghaier, 32, the Tunisian biotechnologist convicted in the Via Rail terror plot, is “actively psychotic” with untreated schizophrenia and is unable to participate meaningfully in his own sentencing hearing, according to a psychiatric evaluation.

The diagnosis appears to threaten the legal integrity of one of Canada’s most dramatic terror trials, raising the possibility Ontario has convicted a man when he was not only unrepresented by counsel, by his own choice, but unfit even to stand trial. He now faces a life sentence.

It also raises the possibility Esseghaier’s co-conspirator, Raed Jaser, was convicted of a murderous conspiracy with someone who was losing touch with reality.

Coupled with Esseghaier’s rantings against the “lies” of the psychiatrist who examined him, the revelation marked the bizarre climax of an unusual sentencing hearing, in which previously unheard of diagnoses of serious mental illness are being revealed in the hopes of reducing punishment, laying grounds for appeal, or even derailing the case.

On Monday, for example, court heard Jaser was diagnosed as a lifelong drug addict whose criminal behaviour was not intentional terrorism, but rather an elaborate scheme to get money. The Crown vigorously dismantled much of this theory, painting it as the last-ditch lie of a man who was caught in the act.

Lisa Ramshaw, who examined Esseghaier, has not yet been cross-examined, but her diagnosis of schizophrenia was more robustly justified. Esseghaier himself has demonstrated his peculiarities, from picking at his beard and sleeping in court to ranting at the judge, even once giving him the thumbs up sign.

“As a consequence of (Esseghaier’s) psychosis, that is his loss of touch with reality and his delusional beliefs, it is my opinion that he is not able to communicate and participate in the court proceedings,” said Ramshaw, a senior forensic psychiatrist with the Centre for Addiction & Mental Health in Toronto and one of Canada’s top experts on criminal insanity, for defence and prosecution alike.

“He believes he is a visitor to the court,” she said, there only to communicate his views of Islam. Indeed, Judge Michael Code has started proceedings by referring to him as a spiritual adviser, which has partly placated Esseghaier’s demands to be tried under Shariah law, rather than Canada’s Criminal Code.

Tuesday’s sentencing hearing degenerated such that Code removed Esseghaier from the courtroom for disrupting the proceedings by trying to sleep across four chairs in the prisoner’s dock, in protest at Ramshaw’s testimony.

She described him as having bright eyes and a joyous affect, with fixed false beliefs that grew ever more grandiose and self-referential. He believed, for example, his birthday has mathematical significance because the digits can be arranged to give the number 19, which he sees as religiously symbolic, and related to the number of angels who guard hell, marking him as a prophet, similar to Joseph and Jesus. He seemed confused when Ramshaw pointed out other people have the same birthday.

His illness appears to have started at about age 27 in 2009, when he grew a beard, not long after he arrived in Canada to do high-level graduate work on biosensors for the medical industry. This coincided with a renewed devotion to his faith, Islam, which appears to be Sunni, but is highly idiosyncratic and not based on established texts or practices.

His research colleagues described a man who became increasingly isolated and difficult, sometimes ripping down posters in laboratories that showed pictures of women, and ranting about the role of Islam in Canada.

His thought is not grossly disorganized, but it is slow, and he gets stuck on topics and cannot leave them, known as cognitive inflexibility. This has grown worse over time, compromising his ability to understand what is going on, Ramshaw said.

“He has no insight into his difficulties,” she testified, describing his disruptive behaviour as “illustrative of his inabilities,” rather than “wilful and obstinate.”

Most dramatic was his denial of the current date. He thinks he has been systematically fooled by jail guards and prisoners, who he believes are making a movie about him, into thinking that the time is moving faster than it is, partly by tricking him with fake sunlight.

His rationale for this idea is his firm belief he is destined to be taken into paradise on Dec. 25, 2014, a date reflective of his spiritual closeness to Jesus.

“While Mr. Esseghaier’s views prior to his arrest appeared to flow from extremist religious beliefs, his self-referential interpretations of the Qur’an, knowing the age of his own death, his grandiosity, and his persecutory beliefs about the correctional officers and prisoners are now clearly delusionally based,” Ramshaw’s report reads.

“Mr. Esseghaier is clearly psychotic at this juncture and will more likely than not remain that way until treated with antipsychotic medication.”

All this adds up to a major legal problem. People before criminal courts must be able to meaningfully participate.

Ramshaw said she could not say whether Esseghaier was fit to be tried earlier this year — he and Jaser were convicted in March — but suggested she might be able to if she had more information, such as legal records and medical evidence of how he would respond to anti-psychotic medication. Fitness requires being able to follow proceedings and instruct counsel or, in Esseghaier’s case, participate as his own.

TORONTO — Raed Jaser, convicted in March of conspiracy to murder in the Via Rail case, is not a terrorist ideologue and had no intention nor motivation to hurt anyone, according to a psychologist’s testimony in a bitterly contested sentencing hearing.

On the contrary, Jaser was a drug-addicted, psychologically broken “con-man” whose dealings with an undercover Federal Bureau of Investigation agent posing as a terrorist financier were solely aimed at scamming money from fellow Muslims to feed a habit that cost as much as $2,000 a week.

Unlike a typical terrorist, Jaser, 38, a stateless Canadian permanent resident who faces a maximum life sentence, had no ethnic, religious, or national identity, said Jess Ghannam, clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco.

In a psychiatric evaluation, he expressed remorse and demonstrated a wide range of emotional reactions, which is unusual for convicted terrorists, who are typically committed to ideology and being caught rarely changes that.

“His primary identity was that of a substance abuser,” Ghannam testified, describing an addiction that grew from marijuana, hashish, alcohol and weekend party drugs to a daily intake of methamphetamine.

For a terrorist, “life in the present is somewhat secondary to life afterwards,” he said. But Jaser was the opposite, scheming to feed a constant need for substances any Muslim would regard as forbidden.

“This is an individual who is quite broken, psychologically,” Ghannam said. He led a “secret double life” to hide his addiction from his family. His report also mentions a 2006 suicide attempt using drugs.

“Con men are really good at becoming what they need to become in order to con people,” he testified. He acknowledged that malingering, or faking symptoms, was a real possibility and something he watched for, but did not see. “I assumed that (Jaser) would try to con me,” Ghannam said.

He described the man as low risk for re-offending, but acknowledged life-long treatment for addiction was probably “in the cards.” He even noted Jaser’s love of cats, and his unwillingness to kill spiders and mosquitoes, as a “protective factor” for his future prospects.

Ghannam has wide experience in U.S. terrorist cases, usually as a defence expert, on matters including the effects of “enhanced interrogation” and torture at Guantanamo Bay on a person’s likelihood of re-offending.

He took pains to say he “honoured” the jury’s verdict — Jaser was convicted of conspiracy to murder and participation in a terrorist group; his fellow conspirator Chiheb Esseghaier was additionally convicted of plotting to derail a Via train — but said he had a fuller view of the situation, its history and context, based on interviews with Jaser and his family in May. He said his view is “not incompatible” with the jury’s findings of guilt.

The jury is now discharged. Sentencing is in the hands of Judge Michael Code, who presided over Monday’s hearing, but has not yet ruled on what use, if any, will be made of Ghannam’s opinions.

Related

Crown prosecutor Croft Michaelson vigorously attacked Ghannam’s proposed status as an expert in risk assessment and rehabilitative prospects for convicted terrorists, a field he called “theoretical” and one Ghannam acknowledged was “emerging.”

A key dispute was the significance to Jaser of the abortion of a pregnancy that began in late 2009, which his wife, whom he met in 2008, wanted to carry to term. After the abortion, his wife (identified by court order as MZ) started wearing the hijab, Jaser grew a beard, and both became isolated from their friends as he spent more time at a mosque.

Ghannam’s report says around this time Jaser became “despondent, depressed and more desperate for money,” which the expert said was related to his addiction. But his notes do not mention drugs. Rather, they quote Jaser’s brother saying he “felt like he was going to be punished.”

Michaelson accused Ghannam of confirmation bias, of fitting facts into his premature conclusions about addiction, and failing to consider guilt over this abortion prompted the former party boy drug addict to become an extremist Muslim willing to plot terror.

“You ignored it,” Michaelson said.

The sentencing hearing continuesTuesday, when a psychiatric evaluation of Esseghaier is expected to be discussed, including a psychiatrist’s findings of delusion and possible schizophrenia.

This weekend, Greece stands on the brink of economic collapse, awaiting negotiations on debt relief at an emergency summit.

Keen observers of geopolitics will recall a similar situation from last weekend, when Greece stood on the brink of economic collapse, awaiting a referendum.

These recurring cliffhangers follow a familiar script, last seen in the crises over America’s national debt, which was two days away from the brink of government shutdown in 2011, then again in 2013, when it actually went over the so-called “fiscal cliff,” only to be saved by clever legislation.

In economics and politics especially, the metaphorical brink of disaster is an elusive place, always looming, but still seeming to recede into the distance, like the horizon. Even when you pass it, as both the U.S. Congress and Greece did, it remains somehow ahead.

Greece’s potential calamity is not an illusion, of course. Unlike a ship on the ocean, Greece really could fall off the edge of Europe into solitary bankruptcy.

But a survey of recent efforts at compromise – from union negotiations that put the London Underground on strike during Wimbledon, to Iranian nuclear negotiations that lurch from deadline to deadline with no obvious progress, to teachers in Ontario who will be in a strike position in time for the first day of school – reveals the power in the idea of the brink. It is the bogeyman of negotiations, the monster that always seems to stay in the closet, but still makes people wet the bed.

Creating a brink by setting an arbitrary deadline “is usually a terribly thing to do to the negotiation,” said Stuart Diamond, emeritus professor at the Wharton School of Business and principal negotiation instructor for tech giant Google, who has trained its executives on how to avoid their own Greek tragedies.

The only way such a deadline ever benefits anyone is when the bridges are destined to be burned. “If you never want to see him again, by all means, do it (impose a deadline),” Diamond said. But deadlines feel like threats, which make people angry, defensive, even irrational.

“Life is not a football game. There is a tomorrow,” he said. “The more you set deadlines, the longer the negotiation takes. That’s why it took the U.S. Congress three years on the debt crisis to do three months’ worth of work.”

As he describes in his book on negotiation, Getting More, the looming deadline also harms the decision making process, suppressing creativity and options, and increasing poor judgment, negative emotions and stress. In short, even the sharpest negotiators tend to panic and lose their judgment at the cliff top.

When he technically “won” the referendum, for example, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras praised Greeks for giving him “greater negotiating strength,” and then proceeded to sacrifice his finance minister and show up to emergency negotiations with no new proposals. On Friday, he appeared to have conceded to demands for austerity measures and was trying to get them through the Greek Parliament, which would pull the country back from the brink, for now.

“I don’t think Greece has anything to do with money,” Diamond said. “It’s got to do with all the emotions of the stakeholders. Germany needs to go, and U.S. needs to go, to Greece, and say ‘What can I do for you?’ That will calm them down enough to negotiate effectively.”

Sometimes the brink marks the inevitable intrusion of reality upon competing interests, such as when the money runs out, in which case it can usually be foreseen far in advance, as it was in Greece. Sometimes the brink is an arbitrary deadline, as it frequently is in labour negotiations, or in the Iranian talks led by Secretary of State John Kerry, who vowed on Thursday that the U.S. “will not be rushed,” and has apparently set out to prove it.

In rare black swan events, though, the brink can appear unannounced out of the fog. As its markets plummeted this week, China got a sense of this feeling, as the rest of the world did in the financial crisis of 2008.

The word “brink” is of Scandinavian origin, meaning just as it does in English today, the edge of a cliff. As with many evocative words, though, the metaphorical usage has eclipsed the literal. No one ever stands on the brink of a cliff, looking out at the sunset. They stand at the edge.

The brink is more than the edge. It usually implies an ongoing dynamic, that you are not just standing there; you are going over unless you pull back or something stops you.

It has even inspired a term of art, brinkmanship (often rendered “brinksmanship,” a construction based on similar words like salesmanship or swordsmanship), for those who work the brink into their strategy. Russian President Vladimir Putin has engaged in this everywhere from Ukraine to the skies over Canadian waters, where his military planes fly reckless sorties into foreign airspace, and his soldiers foment discord and violence in sovereign states.

The brink is more than the edge. It usually implies an ongoing dynamic, that you are not just standing there; you are going over unless you pull back

Often brinkmanship is used as a term of scorn, paired with adjectives like “rash” or “reckless,” and applied to people, like Putin, who appear to be picking fights they are unwilling or unable to fight without risking nuclear annihilation. North Korea’s hereditary dictatorship of Kims has offered much to illustrate this kind of brinkmanship, but so have the great nations of Europe.

In The War That Ended Peace, historian Margaret MacMillan quotes her great-grandfather, the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who wrote in his memoirs: “The nations slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war without any trace of apprehension or dismay.”

Brinkmanship is also praised as a virtue, though, akin to a sly bravery, notably by former U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who is said to have coined the term, and described it like this in 1956: “The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art. If you cannot master, it, you inevitably get into war. If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost.”

This quip became political fodder, leading Adlai Stevenson to criticize Dulles for “boasting of his brinkmanship… the art of bringing us to the edge of the nuclear abyss.” A few years later, it would take on a new relevance when the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the nuclear brink to end all brinks, an episode that was famously saved by heroic 11th hour negotiations.

Diamond, who is also a former journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner, had sharp words for Dulles’ style of brinksmanship.

“He and his family were going to the government’s shelter from atomic bombs. He played with 25 or 30 million people’s lives in saying that. He got away with it, but he played with the lives of 25 million people,” he said.

The brink is a powerful franchise. It builds on a cache of cultural tropes, from the movies to the news, many of which carry the fairytale implication that things always work out in the end. Often they do. Even as Athens teeters, for example, it seems likely that this week’s premiere of “Grexit 2: This Time It Means Business” will be followed in due course by “Grexit 3: The Reckoning,” and so on.

Some people do go over the brink, though, countries too, which is worth recalling when the next disaster is averted. It is as if some primordial attraction lures us to the edge of our comfort, just to see what lies beyond, and how we would face it. As Aerosmith aptly put it in Livin’ On The Edge: “If Chicken Little tells you that the sky is fallin’ / Even if it wasn’t would you still come crawlin’ / Back again? / I bet you would my friend / Again and again and again and again.”

As Greeks vote in a referendum that could see it drop the common currency of Europe, an ancient European nation that is famed for its cultural and intellectual heritage stands on the brink of an existential crisis.

That nation is Germany.

Greece may be voting on its own perilous future this weekend, choosing between bitter austerity and leaving the eurozone, in which it is a basketcase junior partner.

But a Grexit, as Greek’s return to the drachma is known, may pose an even greater threat to Germany, the economic top dog of Europe, which has led negotiations to prevent it.

“Just on a purely practical or strategic level, Angela Merkel doesn’t want to be the chancellor to start breaking down the European Union,” said Phil Triadafilopoulos, associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto, specializing in Germany and Greece.

As an idea, Europe is a strategy to ensure peace through co-operation after centuries of near constant war, especially the century just passed. Germans, whose modern forebears lived under dictatorship and occupation in a single generation, understand this better and more deeply than most, and the fear that the Greek crisis could cause a wider splintering of the eurozone — and even threaten the European Union — hits them especially hard.

“The common currency was in some parts designed to keep Germany in Europe,” Triadafilopoulos said. “The reason for being of the European project, and the European Union, is to avoid the nationalist and destructive tendencies of the past, of which Germany was a lead player obviously, but blame can be roundly shared. The aim, principally, was to preserve peace in Europe after World War II.”

Today, it is no longer Germany but the Russian Federation that glowers at the Western world, using its economic influence to conjure a vision of imperial destiny.

Germany tried that and failed apocalyptically, and so now it sees the European project as key to its identity, even more so than many of its partners. Both Britain and France, for example, which have comparably strong economies, have major anti-Europe political movements.

There is no equivalent movement in Germany, though.

“And it’s not without reason,” Triadafilopoulos said. “Germans are very well aware of their past, and recent generations of Germans are especially wary and aware of their past. So the European project for most Germans, elite and non-elite alike, is about more than a currency union, or a trade union, or even a union that allows for the free movement of people. It’s an idea, it’s part of the German identity.”

Economic might does not sit lightly on German shoulders, and this has influenced the way Germany leads, which is to say reluctantly, cautiously, and with a fixation on following the rules.

The rhetoric of the Greek negotiations has been high pitched. Germany has called Greece’s compromise plan a Trojan Horse, which is the Greek version of invoking the Nazis to describe Germans (as indeed the Greeks have done by seeking war reparations as part of a deal). Merkel has even used the word blackmail. In both cases, though, the basic fear was that Greece would take a German-brokered bailout from the “troika” of the International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank and the European Commission, but not play by the shared rules of austerity.

“Germany, first and foremost, wants to be the country that makes sure that everybody plays by the rules, and the same rules apply to everybody,” said Christian Leuprecht, a political scientist at Royal Military College of Canada and Queen’s University.

The totalitarianism of the past looms in Germany’s political consciousness, and it has tried to learn its own lessons, Leuprecht said. “But those lessons are not the lessons the world would necessarily want Germany to draw,” he said.

The American stereotype is of meddling uninvited in global affairs, but in recent decades Germany has been seen as the opposite, a country that “writes the cheques but stays in the background,” Leuprecht said.

Germany, first and foremost, wants to be the country that makes sure that everybody plays by the rules, and the same rules apply to everybody

“People get very nervous when Germany thrusts itself on the global stage,” he said. “We spent the first 50 years of the 20th century trying to push the Germans back into their borders, we spent the next 50 years trying to keep them there, and now we’re all surprised when they’re kind of reluctant to go anywhere. This is also how the Germans look at their economic might.”

They are simply reluctant to use it. Triadafilopoulos calls Germany the “reluctant hegemon” of Europe.

The Grexit crisis has illustrated this, as Merkel’s strategy, executed mainly by her Finance Minister, seems to have been to articulate the ground rules, then just let the chips fall where they may. As a result, in the end, it is Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, a politically inexperienced left-wing ideologue, who has been huffing and puffing on Twitter: “Voting NO on a solution that isn’t viable doesn’t mean saying NO to Europe. It means demanding a solution that’s realistic.”

Merkel, for her part, has cut off negotiations until the referendum results are known. Her hope, which appears to be backed by market reactions, is that Greeks will vote to accept a deal, Tsipras will pay the price of his office, and a deal will be reached to keep Greece in the eurozone.

Merkel’s mentor Helmut Kohl, who played a role in building monetary union, inspired a political term of art for this leadership style, “aussitzen,” meaning “taking a pass” or delaying a decision in the hope all will work out fine.

Germany had many opportunities over the last five years to draw this episode to a close by giving in to Greek demands for what Leuprecht described as “protection money on Europe.” Her decision to call Tsipras’ bluff has made her the very model of the modern German Chancellor, but it comes at great national risk.

“Greeks and Germans share this deep, existential attachment to the European project, and that may be what carries [the referendum] through,” said Triadafilopoulos.

Online retailing behemoth Amazon is changing its pay structure for self-published authors. Rather than pay once for a whole book, it will now pay each time a page is digitally flipped.

It’s a subtle tweak to business strategy that could change both the style and profitability of self-published books, from fan fiction to memoir. But it is also reflective of a force that has swept over all the creative professions in the digital age, nearly killing some of them, and forcing others to dramatically adapt to survive — the tyranny of the metric.

From shares, likes, retweets and comments to clicks, favourites and page views, nearly every aspect of modern creative culture is evaluated, bought and sold via countable nuggets that aspire to reduce quality to quantity.

It is not just creative writing. The trend is evident across the humanities, from psychology’s obsession with data collection to philosophy’s flirtation with experimentation. But writing has felt it most deeply, with the most drastic industrial effects.

Where wisdom once was, quantification will now be

“Numerical values are assigned to things that cannot be captured by numbers,” the cultural critic Leon Wieseltier wrote this year. “Where wisdom once was, quantification will now be.”

Likewise, in Harper’s magazine this month, writer Caleb Crain identifies a “new kind of disenchantment” in literature, in which value has blurred with measurable popularity.

“The catalyst, I believe, is the recent revolutionary advance in counting,” he wrote.

This disenchantment was evident in the howling lamentations that followed Amazon’s announcement, similar to concerns about the music industry in the age of free streaming. Some called on Taylor Swift, or her literary equivalent, to rise up and slay the corporate dragon, as Swift did over Apple’s plan not to pay artists for the first three months of its Apple Music service, which is free to subscribers.

Under the new plan, which begins Wednesday, the amount authors will be paid will be based on their share of total page views of books in the Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.

Amazon, which declined an interview request, described it like this in a press release: “We’re making this switch in response to great feedback we received from authors who asked us to better align payout with the length of books and how much customers read.”

A look at the numbers, though, recalls the joke that the difference between a writer and a pizza is that a pizza can feed a family. The average payout barely cracks $1 a book. Only the first reading of a page counts. Books that are reread, on this scheme, are of no greater value. And the unread novel, which has been an important part of the publishing industry if not literature, will be worthless.

John Degen, executive director of the Writers’ Union of Canada and chairman of the International Authors Forum, compared the new payment system to the old Nielsen television ratings.

There was a little bit of voodoo, a bit of magic involved in trusting those statistics

“There was a little bit of voodoo, a bit of magic involved in trusting those statistics,” he said. “It’s so hard to talk about this stuff because who really truly understands or even truly trusts the technology (of page view tracking)?”

The novelist Chuck Wendig put it more artfully in a blog post: “For all we know, there’s a chimpanzee high on DMT throwing darts at a bingo chart taped to the wall.”

Amazon says its page flip algorithm standardizes font and spacing so that pages are common literary currency, but it remains a proprietary black box. And like the Nielsen ratings, a lot of money hangs on it.

“Do we want to trust those stats when we’re making industrial decisions around payment?” Degen said. “Because as soon as we start to trust a stat like that, someone figures out how to game it … It’s kind of an untrustworthy thing to introduce into an industry that does actually depend on real attention.”

Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg NewsAmazon's effort to reduce a book's value to its page count taps a deep vein of insecurity among writers. How can you compare something you can read in an afternoon — George Orwell's Animal Farm — to something you can barely get through in a lifetime — James Joyce's Ulysses.

On the other hand, he has heard many self-published authors are happy about the change because they expect it will make them more money.

“It scares the hell out of traditional authors, and I think it should,” Degen said. “The idea of a per-page royalty on a traditional book, a book that depends on single-copy sales, it’s kind of terrifying.”

The traditional model is that once the sale is made, the writer is paid, even if the book goes unread, or it is put down in boredom, or sits on a coffee table as a conversation piece or aspirational decor, like countless copies of The Goldfinch.

“Asking the writer to be responsible for what happens to the book after it leaves the bookstore is entirely unfair, because the author has done their work and sold their product and they should expect their compensation,” Degen said. “So I would not want to see the per-page royalty come across to single-copy sales.”

If you want to start a fist fight, go to a group of writers and suggest that a short story writer does less work

One theory about Amazon’s gambit is it could push self-published authors away from the pressure to produce many novels of middling value, toward a few good ones. Another is that writers will internalize it, and write stories fit for digital purpose — in effect, click-bait novels.

As David Sanderson wrote in The Times of London, the ideal book “will now be a 700-pager with a cliffhanger every few pages and a couple of pictures in each chapter.”

This effort to reduce a book’s value to its page count taps a deep vein of insecurity among writers. How can you compare something you can read in an afternoon — The Sense of an Ending, Heart of Darkness, Animal Farm, The Old Man and the Sea — to something you can barely get through in a lifetime — Ulysses, A la recherche du temps perdu, Infinite Jest?

It is a perennial artistic mystery to which Amazon has offered a modern corporate answer, but it is unlikely to be the last word.

As Degen put it, “If you want to start a fist fight, go to a group of writers and suggest that a short story writer does less work.”

NIKLAS HALLE'N/AFP/Getty ImagesRevellers celebrate the pagan festival of Summer Solstice at Stonehenge in Wiltshire, southern England on June 21, 2015.

Dressed as Druids, Wiccans, hippies, punks or just as regular tourists, nearly 25,000 people gathered Sunday at Stonehenge on Britain’s Salisbury Plain, marking the summer solstice as people have done for thousands of years.

The sun rose at 4:52 a.m. on the longest day of the year, and for the lucky dozens who made it through the crowds to the interior of the neolithic stone circle, the rising sun could be seen in near perfect alignment with the Heel Stone, outside the famous ring.

It is this remarkable alignment, and another that aligns with sunset on the winter solstice, that has inspired such awe and interest in Stonehenge. It shows that whoever built it had a detailed understanding of the celestial path of the sun, but its ritual purpose or meaning has never been fully determined. It is deeply fixed in the British imagination, though, as a place of mystery and spirit, linked (though not necessarily by science) to the Iron Age Druid priestly caste and the foundational myth of King Arthur.

Some theories have it as primarily a ceremonial place to mark for the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. Others see it as related to a nearby ritual feasting site, with burial mounds and a large building, long since rotted away. Much effort has gone into explaining how the stones got here from a quarry almost 400 kilometres away in Wales, and still it is not precisely clear whether they came by glacial movement, or by raft, or sled, or dragged on rollers, or even by an elaborate process of wobbling them along with ropes.

The welcoming of the solstice, one of the few occasions when visitors are allowed to walk among the stones, was a peaceful affair, with only nine arrests for drug offences, far fewer than last year.

AP Photo/Tim IrelandThe sun rises as thousands of revellers gathered at the ancient stone circle Stonehenge to celebrate the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, near Salisbury, England, Sunday, June 21, 2015.

NIKLAS HALLE'N/AFP/Getty ImagesA man dressed as a mime celebrates the pagan festival of Summer Solstice at Stonehenge in Wiltshire, southern England on June 21, 2015.

One person wore an elaborate feather headdress, another wore a tiger print blazer, and another was dressed as a mime. One woman with a ring of white flowers in her hair pressed her cheek against the ancient rock. There were yoga classes and marriage vows and plenty of drums.

Stonehenge was built in stages between about 5000 and 3500 years ago, but there is archeological evidence a nearby spring was a site of pilgrimage since the end of the last ice age, almost 10,000 years ago.

It has become a major tourist draw worth millions to Britain, visited recently by U.S. President Barack Obama, and its upkeep has been a political headache since the land was donated to the state during the First World War.

Last year, the British government resurrected plans to build a highway tunnel through Stonehenge to conceal the road that currently passes close by.

Traffic on the famously congested highway has been an irritant to people who would prefer a more peaceful and historically authentic experience of this ancient landscape, on chalk downs southwest of London. A new visitor centre was opened two years ago.

“Solstice 2015 has been a great success with approximately 23,000 people celebrating at Stonehenge in the positive, friendly atmosphere as they waited for the sunrise,” said Gavin Williams, who led the Wiltshire police in managing the event. “This year the crowds were able to see the sun as it appeared over the horizon, before it disappeared under low cloud. The success of the event depends largely on the good nature of those attending and we are pleased that people could enjoy solstice in the spirit of the event.”

Related

AP Photo/Tim IrelandThe sun rises as thousands of revellers gathered at the ancient stone circle Stonehenge to celebrate the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, near Salisbury, England, Sunday, June 21, 2015.

NIKLAS HALLE'N/AFP/Getty ImagesA reveller rests her head on a megalith as she and others celebrate the pagan festival of Summer Solstice at Stonehenge in Wiltshire, southern England on June 21, 2015. The festival, which dates back thousands of years, celebrates the longest day of the year when the sun is at its maximum elevation. Modern druids and people gather at the landmark Stonehenge every year to see the sun rise on the first morning of summer.

AP Photo/Tim Ireland

NIKLAS HALLE'N/AFP/Getty ImagesRevellers celebrate the pagan festival of Summer Solstice at Stonehenge in Wiltshire, southern England on June 21, 2015. The festival, which dates back thousands of years, celebrates the longest day of the year when the sun is at its maximum elevation. Modern druids and people gather at the landmark Stonehenge every year to see the sun rise on the first morning of summer.

AP Photo/Tim IrelandPeople dance as thousands of revellers gathered at the ancient stone circle Stonehenge to celebrate the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, near Salisbury, England, Sunday, June 21, 2015.

NIKLAS HALLE'N/AFP/Getty ImagesRevellers celebrate the pagan festival of Summer Solstice at Stonehenge in Wiltshire, southern England on June 21, 2015.

AP Photo/Tim IrelandPeople lie down together as thousands of revellers gathered at the ancient stone circle Stonehenge to celebrate the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, near Salisbury, England, Sunday, June 21, 2015.

TORONTO — By invoking human nature to explain sexual abuse in the military, Canada’s top military man, General Thomas Lawson, walked a familiar but dangerous philosophical path.

“It would be a trite answer,” he told Peter Mansbridge this week, evidently realizing his comment was going wobbly before he even said it. “But it’s because we’re biologically wired in a certain way and there will be those who believe it is a reasonable thing to press themselves and their desires on others,” he said.

“It’s not the way it should be,” the general added, as if to say: It is just the way it is.

From the Garden of Eden to the modern metaphors of genetic fate and “hardwired” brains, the concept of human nature has long been associated with bad behaviour. It conjures images of animal desires held in check by flimsy civilization, and is typically brought up when people have given in to primitive passions and done things they should not do. Conveniently, it is almost impervious to moral objections because human nature is, by definition, natural.

This supposedly basic ugliness of human nature is a persistent idea, and modern expressions have mapped neatly onto the ancient Biblical notion of the Fall, in which God’s salvation is offered to people who are by nature sinful.

It is also romantic in its way, with examples from Oscar Wilde’s quip that we are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars, to Michael Jackson, who sang about being on the sexual prowl: “If this town is just an apple, then let me take a bite. If they say ‘Why? Why?’ tell them that is human nature.”

But the concept of human nature as unbridled passion is also a moral dodge, a way to deflect blame from a person onto a theory about people, a gimmick to score a cheap point in a serious argument by appealing to Biology 101.

“It is the new default position,” said Emer O’Hagan, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Saskatchewan who teaches a course on human nature. The problem with its popularity, she said, is that this “speedy move to biological determinism” is more an excuse than an explanation.

It is the intellectual version of throwing one’s hands up in despair. It is like saying my brain made me do it, or my genes made me do it, and it has relevance to everything from sexual violence to addiction and illness.

“It’s very useful to think about our human nature. Whether or not we can ever exactly determine what that is, [I don’t know]. In the history of Western philosophy we certainly haven’t,” O’Hagan said. “But I do find myself very suspicious of these moves to assert that some kind of behaviour is essentially determined by biology, especially when it is a claim that’s really an excusing claim, and not an appropriate explanation of what’s really going on in a social interaction.”

The question of what is a human being is “as difficult as it is important,” according to the Oxford Companion to Philosophy. “A major problem is that it is not immediately obvious what kind of answer would satisfy… Is there some qualitative difference between humans and other animals, or is it all a question of quantities and balance? Is there one key thing that all humans have, or is there a range of qualities, irregularly dispersed? And, most crucially, is human nature inherently good, bad, or indifferent?”

“Bad” is a common response. The Enlightenment philosopher Thomas Hobbes, for example, described a state of nature in which human lives are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Civilization, on this view, everything from table manners to criminal law, is a grand social contract that binds us against the dangers of human nature, with its base appetites of rape, pillage, murder, and chewing with your mouth open.

Other answers have run the gamut from Sartre, who denied a human nature on the grounds that “existence precedes essence,” to Nietzsche, who rejected the soul/body duality, to Freud, who saw human nature as roiling storm of sexual passions, to E.O. Wilson and Steven Pinker, who have put the final nails in the coffin of the “blank slate” view that humans are formed only by their upbringing, with no basic nature.

Lisa Shapiro, professor of philosophy at Simon Fraser University, describes the historical shift from the view of Aristotle, in which everything has an end goal and being good depends on performing this natural function, to the view that arose in the Enlightenment, in which nature is not imbued with moral purpose, but is more like a clock, a mechanistic system in which different elements are causally connected.

“Insofar as human beings are part of the natural world, that poses a very particular problem for thinking about human beings and how to hold them responsible for their actions,” she said. “If you’re just determined by your biology, who’s to hold you accountable?”

FilesThomas Hobbes once described life of humans as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

There are some who think the very idea of human nature should be banished entirely as inherently misleading.

“The concept of human nature has considerable currency among evolutionists who are interested in humans. Yet when examined closely it is vacuous,” wrote Peter Richerson of the University of California – Davis and University College London, in a short essay last year on why the concept of “human nature” should be retired. “Worse, it confuses the thought processes of those who attempt to use it. Useful concepts are those that cut nature at its joints. Human nature smashes bones.”

Nature is traditionally contrasted to nurture, or the effects of environment and upbringing on the mature organism. But this contrast can be more trouble than it is worth. As Donald Hebb, the Canadian neuroscientist, once put it, asking which contributes more to an organism, nature or nurture, is like asking what contributes more to the area of a rectangle, its length or its width.

Timo Hannay, a scientific publisher, took it a step further and wrote that “nature or nurture” is a “beguiling concept” with a “poetic moniker” that “truly deserves a bullet in the back of its head.”

Speculation about hardwired brains as an explanation for bad behaviour, then, is just the latest in a long tradition of hamfisted appeals to human nature.

“It’s always been acknowledged that human beings have a nature that needs to be channelled or directed,” Shapiro said. “Today some people think about human nature a bit reductively in terms of DNA, but just having genes does not determine that all those genes will be expressed. There are environmental factors that influence the expression of genes … There’s this move that gets made unwittingly to take a human being in isolation. But that’s not what we are.”

Facing high level demands that he be fired, just weeks before his planned retirement, General Lawson apologized this week and said his “unhelpful comments were a conjecture that really did serve no purpose and, in fact, clouded the very strong efforts that we have going forward.”

On this, at least, he was bang on.

“Someone who wants to appeal to human nature as a moral dodge has a problem on their hands, because they need to explain where morality comes from. It’s going to have to come from outside human nature,” Shapiro said. “You can’t have it both ways. If you want to be a hardgoing naturalist, and just say human beings are hardwired to act in the ways we act, then you lose a ground for making any moral evaluations at all.”

Two young men were watching hydroplane races on the Columbia River in 1996 when one of them waded into shallow water, dislodged what looked like a rock and noticed it had teeth. It was the 9,000-year-old skull of a man whose skeletal remains, remarkably preserved, would inspire a furious legal battle between scientists who wanted to study them and American Indian tribes who wanted to rebury them.

The scientists won in court, and now the scientific dispute is largely resolved, thanks to a newly published genetic comparison with modern indigenous people. Kennewick Man, or the Ancient One, as he came to be known, was not a Polynesian or an ancient indigenous Japanese, and certainly not a European Viking as some early analyses of his skull shape suggested. His DNA is clearly Native American, closely related to modern members of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation.

“There’s some kind of irony there,” said Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagan, one of several authors on the new paper in Nature. “It is very clear that genome sequence shows he is most closely related to contemporary Native Americans.”

It is an anti-climactic outcome for a long-running anthropological scandal that threatened to overturn the common understanding of how human beings, a species that arose in Africa, first arrived on the virgin continent of North America.

‘We want him back in the ground for his final resting place, and not to be poked and prodded’

Not wanting to miss the races, the college kids hid the skull in the bushes, came back later with a bucket, and took their find to police, thinking they had stumbled on a murder victim.

Excavation revealed nearly all of a prehistoric skeleton, almost 400 bones, with a stone spear point embedded in the hip, around which new bone had healed. Kennewick Man was about five foot eight, 40 or 50 years old, and right handed. His arm bones were noticeably bent, possibly from muscles developed over a lifetime of vigorous spear hunting. Although he was found far inland, in shallow water in a reservoir of the Columbia River, near a golf course, his bone chemistry suggested he spent most of his life on the Pacific Coast, eating fish and other marine life.

He had been deliberately buried — on his back, arms at sides, palms facing down, clearly ceremonial — and the remains were only recently scattered by erosion.

Early efforts to extract DNA failed, but examinations of the skull shape suggested the man was a white European, which would have thoroughly undermined the established understanding of early migration to North America.

AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, FileThis July 24, 1997 file photo shows a plastic casting of the skull from the bones known as Kennewick Man in Richland, Washington.

What is known is that there was once a land bridge from Siberia across the Bering Sea, which allowed early populations to reach North America from Asia about 25,000 years ago, and then move southward down the Pacific Coast before spreading east to the Atlantic and south into South America. Later migrations came by sea, first over the Pacific, and only relatively recently from Europe, first by Vikings, and then the fateful voyage of Columbus.

Proof of Kennewick Man’s Asian or Polynesian heritage would have meant ocean migration happened much earlier than currently thought. This would have threatened indigenous origin myths, and forced mainstream science into a total rethink of prehistoric human migration. As it turns out, though, the skeleton — temporarily held in the Burke Museum at the University of Washington — is now likely to be turned over for traditional burial as a Native American.

As Willerslev put it in a press conference, it is an ironic outcome, given the vigour with which anthropologists fought Indian tribes for access to the bones.

The land Kennewick Man was found on is controlled by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the government backed the native claims. In 2000, the U.S. Interior Department ruled the remains should be handed over to five tribes who claimed him as their own, under laws that protect native grave sites.

But anthropologists sued for access, and in 2004, a court ordered that the remains be made available to scientists, largely because the government and native tribes had failed to demonstrate kinship.

This was mainly a technical problem, as all efforts to extract DNA had found the bones were impossibly contaminated with genetic material from the environment. This latest experiment, however, was able to extract a full genome from a small piece of hand bone.

With that, and with DNA samples from the local Colville tribe, it was relatively straightforward to show Kennewick Man was Native American all along, either an ancestor of modern native populations, or a cousin with a recent common ancestor.

“We’re just glad the findings are able to prove what we’ve maintained all along,” Jim Boyd, chairman of the Colville tribal council, told the Seattle Times. “For us, it’s great news. … We want him back in the ground for his final resting place, and not to be poked and prodded.”

A prosecutor who compared an accused murderer to an “animal” and mocked his defence strategy in her opening address has been blamed for tainting a jury in Hamilton, Ont., and forcing a judge to declare a mistrial even before the first witness was called.

Assistant Crown Attorney Kim Rogers went so far as to compare the murder case against Haiden Suarez-Noa to the 1984 movie Impulse, in which rural townsfolk behave in bizarrely erotic ways after toxic waste leaks into the water supply, indulging “their base or most feral instincts,” as she put it.

“Imagine a society in which anyone could act upon his first instincts,” Rogers told the jury after recommending the film. “That ladies and gentlemen, is what this trial is about: the difference between reasonable human beings and animals.”

The remarks, about the stabbing death of Suarez-Noa’s common-law partner, Tania Cowell, were so inflammatory the trial was effectively over by the first lunch break, and is now expected to resume with a new jury in November.

The Crown’s opening address can, by law, offer guidance for the trial ahead, but it is “not the appropriate forum for argument, invective, or opinion,” according to the newly published reasons of Judge Robert B. Reid, about last Wednesday’s mistrial.

It was not just the movie reference or the “animal” comment. The entire address was a legal mess, the judge found, full of “pre-emptive argument” and discussion of, for example, personality traits that could make someone to appear calm while concealing “deep uncontrolled rage.”

Reid said he had no choice but to end the trial — the remedy of last resort — because of the Crown’s “rhetorical over-zealousness, personal opinion, argument, negation of the accused’s right to silence and implied reversal of the onus of proof.”

“Although the reference was not direct, in my view there can be no doubt that counsel was suggesting to the jury that the accused had behaved like an animal rather than a human being in committing the acts which, as she advised the jury, had been admitted,” Reid wrote. “That characterization of the accused was both highly improper and was of such a nature that it could not be erased from the minds of the jurors even with a significant correcting instruction. The fairness of the trial process was irremediably compromised.”

Tania Cowell was 36 when she was stabbed to death in March, 2013, in her apartment in Stoney Creek, part of Hamilton, Ont. She was on maternity leave from a job as a personal support worker for disabled people, helping them live independently.

Her common-law partner, Suarez-Noa, then aged 35, turned himself in to police in Guelph, Ont., a few hours after the killing and has been in custody since. He also handed over their five-month-old son, Bailun, who was unharmed, and is now in the care of Cowell’s family.

All crimes require proof of both a guilty act and a guilty mind. Suarez-Noa admitted the act to police, but pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder. He was expected to argue the partial defence of provocation.

This controversial tactic, which can reduce apparent murder to manslaughter if it happens “in the heat of passion caused by sudden provocation,” is often pleaded and usually fails. A few months after the murder, for example, the Supreme Court of Canada made it even more difficult, saying it “cannot spring from bare, unsupported assertions by the accused.”

The prosecutor told the jury that, to support this strategy, Suarez-Noa would testify, and the jury should consider whether his version squares with the evidence. This, in effect, reversed the burden of proof that properly rests with the Crown.

“She has no place speaking for the defence,” said defence lawyer Charn Gill, who successfully argued Reid should declare the mistrial.

“It is highly inappropriate for Crown counsel to advise the jury of the defence position without a prior agreement, and particularly implying to the jury that the accused will testify,” Reid wrote. “Every accused obviously has an unequivocal right to maintain silence.”

“Although the Crown is entitled to act as a strong advocate within the adversarial process, it cannot adopt a purely adversarial role towards the defence,” Reid cautioned, and he cited a precedent from 1954, in which the Supreme Court said: “It cannot be over emphasized that the purpose of a criminal prosecution is not to obtain a conviction; it is to lay before the jury what the Crown considers to be credible evidence relevant to what is alleged to be a crime.”

“The idea was to spend four weeks in Africa,” Amanda Lindhout wrote in her hostage memoir A House in the Sky. “That was it. In and out.”

The Canadian freelance journalist’s account of her 2008 kidnapping in Somalia, with Australian Nigel Brennan, does not make explicit mention of Ali Omar Ader, the Somali man who was arrested Thursday in Ottawa and now faces criminal allegations of acting as the main negotiator during the 15-month ordeal.

It does, however, describe one of her kidnappers, called Ali, who seemed to be second-in-command and keen to show off his influence within the gang, bragging that “for two years, my life is only jihad.”

“Sister, why are you not afraid?” this man asked her after they were ambushed while trying to reach a camp for internally displaced persons near the Somali capital Mogadishu.

Then 27 years old, she was, of course, terrified, but her memoir, co-authored with Sara Corbett, describes the incredible resilience she showed in concealing this, and surviving, as she and Brennan were shuttled between houses she came to think of as the Bomb-Making House, the Electric House, the Tacky House and the Escape House.

She was guarded by eight young men — they called them “the boys” — and a middle-aged “captain,” some of whom showed a strange respect, and others who abused her.

“There was Hassam, who was one of the market boys, and Jamal, who doused himself in cologne and mooned over the girls he planned to marry, and Abdullah, who just wanted to blow himself up,” she wrote. There was “Skids,” who took her into the desert and “watched impassively” as another man held a knife to her neck, and Romeo, who was accepted into grad school in New York, and wanted to marry her. But Ali stood out for his menace.

“Each time Ali left the room, he seemed to recharge his fury,” she wrote. When he briefly molested her after the ambush, he acted as if she had offended his honour. “I was searching for money. Just money,” he said.

The book tells her story of growing up in Sylvan Lake, Alta.,”a solidly in-between place,” and how she met Brennan, an Australian based in London, in Addis Ababa, early on in her “dream trip” across Africa.

They bonded over Paul Theroux’s book Dark Star Safari, and became lovers, despite Brennan’s wife back in London, and eventually broke up. She found work in Baghdad for the Iranian Press TV. “I was a part of the propaganda machine. I realized this right away,” she wrote.

Somalian presidential office/AFP/Getty ImagesAmanda Lindhout sitting next to Australian journalist Nigel Brennan a few hours before their departure from Somalia following their rescue.

The Somalia trip came as she was trying to get other work. Nigel joined in an effort to cut the costs. When they reunited, he greeted her as “Trout,” a nickname since high school. She called him Breadbeard. They were no longer a couple.

From Mogadishu, they sent a story and pictures to the Red Deer Advocate, which ran them under the headline “Nowhere is a Person Safe in Somalia.” By the time it was published, they had vanished, caught in a trap that appears to have been laid for a pair of male National Geographic journalists.

“We were part of a desperate, wheedling multinational transaction. We were part of a holy war. We were part of a larger problem,” she wrote.

She recalls the bitter scene of the ambush on a roadside, wishing it would turn out to be just a robbery.

“Just then I caught sight of a passerby, a woman, floating like an apparition past us, headed toward a junction in the road. She was looking and not looking, trying to pretend she hadn’t seen us, her head scarf streaming behind her as she moved. She walked on without once looking back. I began to understand that what was happening was real. From behind, someone shoved me toward the ditch,” she wrote.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-Jared MoossyAmanda Lindhout in 2011 speaking to a group of women in Somalia.

A man called Ahmed greeted them in relaxed English. She started talking, saying she was a journalist headed to a refugee camp to “help tell the story of Somalia. I said I loved Somalia already, that its beauty was stunning. I tried to sound earnest, girlish even.”

Recalling her Iranian friends’ advice about talking to Muslims, she said, “I am saddened by the occupation of your country.”

Later, she would read the Koran and convert to Islam, publicly reciting the prayer that seals Islamic redemption.

“What I felt in that moment wasn’t surrender and it wasn’t defiance. This was simply a chess move, an uncertain knight slid two squares ahead and one to the side. It was not a betrayal of faith,” she wrote.

Fifteen torturous months went by. A man named Abdullah raped her. “In 10 seconds it was over. Ten impossibly long seconds. Enough time for the earth to rumble and split, making a gulch between me and the person I’d been,” she wrote.

But eventually, she was handed over to new people she feared were Islamist rebels.

“I caught the faintest whiff of a long-forgotten scent — cigarette smoke. Someone in the car was a smoker. A realization bubbled from the recesses of my rational mind: A fundamentalist wouldn’t smoke. The men in the car didn’t belong to Al-Shabaab.”

One man, a member of the Somali parliament as it turned out, handed her a phone. Her mother was on the line. “Hello, hello?” she said. “Amanda, you’re free.”

With its economy tethered to oil prices, Alberta is known for unconventional, even experimental economic policy.

When he was Alberta’s finance minister, Stockwell Day implemented Canada’s only flat tax. Ralph Bucks, also called “prosperity bonuses,” redistributed a massive temporary surplus through payouts to citizens, while also respecting the province’s value of freedom from government bureaucracy.

Now, with oil prices in the tank and the NDP holding a new majority, a new experiment may be in the works.

A guaranteed minimum income, known as a mincome, has long been a pipe dream of economists across the political spectrum, but especially left-wing anti-poverty activists, people like Joe Ceci, a former Calgary alderman who was a star NDP candidate — and is Alberta’s new finance minister.

Jeff McIntosh/CP/FilesCalgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi said he is hoping for ideas that “would really help us manage poverty in a brand new way,”

The idea of traditionally conservative Alberta as a testing ground for a left wing social policy might seem strange, but it has increasing support.

“The frustrating thing is that we know what the answers are,” Calgary Mayor Nenshi told the National Poverty Reduction Summit, according to a report last month by Roderick Benns of Leaders and Legacies. Nenshi was referring to the idea of negative taxation, which is one way to create a guaranteed minimum income. More recently, he told reporters he hopes Ceci will be bold.

“I am really, really interested if he will bring that to bear in terms of some really significant changes to the taxation system that would really help us manage poverty in a brand new way,” Nenshi said.

Edmonton’s mayor, Don Iveson, has likewise indicated that Alberta’s two major urban hubs would be willing to host pilot programs to evaluate the consequences of guaranteeing income to adults, whether the social benefits outweigh the possibility of exploitation.

Canada has been a leader in this kind of experimenting, but it has been four decades since the last large scale effort, when everyone in Dauphin, Manitoba, was guaranteed a minimum income as a test case. The program ended without an official final analysis, but Evelyn Forget, an economist at the University of Manitoba, did her own analysis and found minor decreases in work effort but larger benefits on various social indicators, from hospitalizations to educational attainment.

“These results would seem to suggest that a Guaranteed Annual Income, implemented broadly in society, may improve health and social outcomes at the community level,” she wrote.

Mincome is an idea that has had many champions over the ages, but few pioneers.

American Founding Father Thomas Paine, in an idea later echoed by Napoleon Bonaparte, argued that, because everyone is entitled to share in general prosperity, states should pay citizens a bonus, perhaps on their 21st birthday, which would minimize the “invidious distinctions” between rich and poor.

Milton Friedman, the American icon of free market economics, liked the idea of simplifying welfare with a guaranteed minimum income and a flat tax, and argued for it in his book Capitalism and Freedom.

In the U.S., parallel experiments to the Dauphin one, aimed at measuring labour market reactions, were overseen in the 1970s, curiously, by Donald Rumsfeld, who headed Richard Nixon’s poverty program, with his aide, Dick Cheney. But nothing was ever put into wide practice.

In Canada, ill-fated Progressive Conservative leader Robert Stanfield was a booster, as is former Tory Senator Hugh Segal, and parliamentary committees have recommended it various times, from 1971 to 2009.

A mincome is most associated with the modern left, though, as a way to eliminate the welfare trap. François Blais, for example, the Quebec MNA and former employment minister, wrote a book on it called Ending Poverty: A Basic Income for All Canadians.

In a 2011 report for the Conference Board of Canada, Glen Hodgson called it a big idea whose time has yet to arrive, and advocated it as an alternative to the mishmash of social programs, for “solid economic, fiscal and social reasons.”

Federal Liberals have resolved to study it in a federal pilot project, and P.E.I.’s new premier has offered to host one.

But it is Alberta that has the momentum, and increasingly, the political will to bring a mincome to reality.

It is unlikely to be an easy task, though. There are dangers and criticisms for the idea, often articulated from the political right.

As The Economist magazine described it last month, in discussing a similar Swiss proposal, a “generous basic income funded by very high taxes would be self-defeating, as it would reintroduce the sort of distortions that many of its advocates hope to banish from the welfare system.

TORONTO — More than half of Canadians support a ban on prayer in public life, such as council meetings or legislative sessions, as was recently imposed by the Supreme Court of Canada.

In a survey of 1,504 Canadian adults, taken after the Supreme Court found official public prayers violate the state’s duty of religious neutrality, three-quarters approved of just starting meetings with no ceremony at all, and a similar proportion approved of a moment of silence.

The least acceptable idea was for rotating specific prayers — Jewish on Monday, for example, Muslim on Tuesday, Christian on Wednesday — which only 30 per cent of people found acceptable.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jacques Boissinot/FilesSaguenay, Que. Mayor Jean Tremblay, responds to reporters' questions in Saguenay, Que., on Saturday, September 1, 2012.

Far more — 52 per cent — approved of a generic prayer to God that did not mention any specific faith. Curiously, two-thirds of Canadians liked the idea of a “quick inspiring pep talk” in place of a prayer.

But a sizeable minority, even including non-religious people, wants to hang on to these traditions, apparently for their own sake.

Despite an increasingly secularist view when it comes to public prayer and God in the public sphere, there is a desire to hang on to these traditions

More than 40 per cent approved of a Christian prayer referring to Jesus, and some of these people are atheists.

“They do exist,” said Shachi Kurl, senior vice-president of the Angus Reid Institute. “The affinity towards keeping traditions as they are appears to, at least when it comes to the national anthem, trump any discomfort we may have around God in the agora, the public square.

“Despite an increasingly secularist view when it comes to public prayer and God in the public sphere, there is a desire to hang on to these traditions,” she said.

The poll followed the Supreme Court decision’s in a case about Saguenay, Que., whose council had taken its religiosity particularly far. It started meetings with the sign of the cross, in council chambers decorated with a crucifix and “a Sacred Heart statue fitted with a red electric votive light,” the court noted.

Alain Simoneau, an atheist constituent, objected to the prayer, which read, in French, “O God, eternal and almighty, from Whom all power and wisdom flow, we are assembled here in Your presence to ensure the good of our city and its prosperity. We beseech You to grant us the enlightenment and energy necessary for our deliberations to promote the honour and glory of Your holy name and the spiritual and material (well‑being) of our city.”

After winning at a human rights tribunal and then losing at appeals court, Simoneau’s view won the day in April at Canada’s top court.

“The prayer recited by the municipal council in breach of the state’s duty of neutrality resulted in a distinction, exclusion and preference based on religion — that is, based on S’s sincere atheism — which, in combination with the circumstances in which the prayer was recited, turned the meetings into a preferential space for people with theistic beliefs,” the court decided.

“Through the recitation of the prayer at issue during the municipal council’s public meetings, the respondents are consciously adhering to certain religious beliefs to the exclusion of all others. In so doing, they are breaching the state’s duty of neutrality.”

The poll aimed to measure public reaction to this decision, but it also “canvasses a much bigger picture around what is the role of prayer in public life,” Kurl said.

It found 56 per cent are in favour of the ruling, and 25 per cent strongly in favour, compared to 44 per cent against, and 18 per cent strongly against.

Kurl said it shows the country is divided along generational, regional and religious lines. “Again, we find ourselves as a country a little bit all over the map,” she said.

Quebec and British Columbia were most supportive of the ban, and Saskatchewan and Atlantic Canada were in strongest disagreement. Two-thirds of younger Canadians support it, compared to fewer than half of those older than 55.

One of the most striking findings, though, was on the similar idea of removing the line “God keep our land glorious and free” from the national anthem.

Typically, discussions of changing the lyrics to O Canada are about making “True patriot love in all thy sons command” gender neutral, which enjoys broad support.

But only seven per cent of respondents agreed with the idea of striking this God reference. Of the rest, most found it “fine” as it was, and slightly fewer agreed the line is “maybe not ideal, but that’s how it was written so just keep it.”

The survey of 1,504 Canadian adults was conducted April 30 to May 3. Because the participants all signed up as members of the Angus Reid Forum online community of 130,000 people, a true margin of error cannot be calculated, but a randomized poll of similar size would have a margin of 2.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. Participants in Angus Reid Forum are paid in the form of “Survey Dollars,” which are redeemable for goods and services, and entrance in prize contests.

GOVERNMENT OF CANADA DOCUMENTThe message, as prepared July 26, 1948 and sent July 27, 1948.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, as the United Nations debated a ban on “cultural genocide” in its 1948 Genocide Convention, Canada urged its delegate to try to spike it.

Early drafts included this controversial concept, now used by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to describe residential schools policy. It was known as Article Three, and if it was not removed from the final draft, Canada was willing to abandon the entire Genocide Convention, records show.

“Following for Wilgress,” reads a telegram sent July 27, 1948 from the Secretary of State for External Affairs in Ottawa to the Canadian delegation at the Palais Des Nations in Geneva. L. Dana Wilgress was an ambassador to the U.S.S.R. right after the Second World War, later High Commissioner in London. At the time, William Lyon Mackenzie King was acting as his own foreign minister.

Released later under access to information, the message had been copied to the Justice Department, delivered in code, labelled “IMPORTANT,” and approved by R.G. “Gerry” Riddell, who would later be Canada’s permanent UN delegate.

“You should support or initiate any move for the deletion of Article three on ‘Cultural’ Genocide. If this move not successful, you should vote against Article three and if necessary, against the Convention. The Convention as a whole less Article three, is acceptable, although legislation will naturally be required to implement the Convention,” it reads.

“The matters dealt with by Article three are more properly relevant to the protection of minorities.”

Canada was joined in opposition to “cultural genocide” by the United States and most of Western Europe, lined up against the Soviet Bloc, which supported it.

All this was done in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, against which some people viewed cultural protections as secondary. There was also disagreement on protection for political groups, as communists and anti-communists alike were the target of state-level extermination strategies.

When it came to a vote that October, Canada’s view won out, and both political groups and “cultural genocide” were excluded. Genocide officially became the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” not necessarily by killing, but also by measures that include serious mental harm and the forced transfer of children.

The term has been used in Canada in the residential schools context for several years, notably by Paul Martin, the former prime minister. But it was not until the past couple of weeks that it shot to national prominence, first when Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin used it in a speech, calling it the modern equivalent of “assimilation.” Then it became the main conclusion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, under chairman Murray Sinclair.

It has been divisive, but enjoys growing, prominent support. Philippe Couillard, the Quebec Premier, for example, said on Friday that residential schools policy could “certainly” be described as cultural genocide.

No drafting change of Article III would make its substance acceptable to his delegation

Edward Sadowski, who has done extensive research and archival work for the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., unearthed the diplomatic cable in an access to information request for Canada’s historical records of the genocide deliberations.

He provided these records to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and although some of his other work is cited, he was surprised the cable was not mentioned in the final report.

“I don’t understand why they did not use that cable and some of the other documents,” he said, as it would have been a “smoking gun.”

The records he obtained also include reference to Canada’s apparent motivation in a transcript of a meeting in Geneva. In the transcript, an Egyptian diplomat summarizes Canada’s position, as articulated earlier by a Canadian delegate named Lapointe, who said Canada fundamentally disagreed with the idea of cultural genocide.

“No drafting change of Article III would make its substance acceptable to his delegation,” the Egyptian said of the Canadian. He acknowledged Canadians were “horrified” at the very idea of cultural genocide, but they were also “deeply attached to their cultural heritage, which was made up mainly of a combination of Anglo-Saxon and French elements, and they would strongly oppose any attempt to undermine the influence of those two cultures in Canada, as they would oppose any similar attempt in any other part of the world.”

The Canadian delegation “was not, therefore, opposed to the idea of cultural genocide, but only to the inclusion in the convention of measures to suppress it,” he said.

Stratford, Ont. — In a tiny courtroom in Ontario farming country, far from the flashbulb glare of Los Angeles, bad boy superstar Justin Bieber pleaded guilty Thursday to assault and careless driving, over a violent confrontation with photographers last summer involving his then girlfriend, the actress and singer Selena Gomez.

Under a plea deal, the Crown dropped a dangerous driving charge over the events of last August 29, when Bieber drove a four-wheel all terrain vehicle into a van two photographers were using to stake him out at his family’s rural property, according to an agreed statement of facts. Bieber then started swinging fists at one of them, Todd Gillis, 47, who said he was able to fend off the enraged heartthrob.

“Why are you here? You can’t be here, you can’t be doing this. Get out of here and leave me alone,” Bieber was yelling, according to the agreed facts, read out by Crown prosecutor Mike Murdoch.

Why are you here? You can’t be here, you can’t be doing this. Get out of here and leave me alone

Bieber landed no more than three punches through the window of the parked van, then “realized he wasn’t getting anywhere,” as Gillis is a much larger man, “twice his size,” as Gillis put it. Still, Gillis was sore in his shoulder afterwards, and both he and the other photographer, Sean O’Neill, 32, both of Toronto, were “very much upset,” Mr. Murdoch said.

Neither made a victim impact statement, and in fact, both plead guilty to trespassing the following day on the Bieber property near Stratford, the town where Bieber grew up before becoming a global superstar.

Appearing in court by video link from a lawyer’s office in California, wearing a white dress shirt, standing respectfully with his hands folded in front of him, Bieber declined to speak on his own behalf when offered the chance by Judge Kathryn McKerlie.

“No ma’am,” he said.

She imposed a fine of $750 for the careless driving, and granted an absolute discharge on the assault charge.

“The lesson in all of this is to think before you act in the future,” the judge said.

The lesson in all of this is to think before you act in the future

Stratford’s most famous son, who has walked the tightrope between musical icon and cautionary tale, still considers Stratford a kind of home, and it is important to him as a respite from his high profile life, in which his frequent transgressions are documented by a ravenous celebrity media, said his lawyer Brian Greenspan.

On this day last summer, he and Gomez took an ATV that seats two people, one in front of the other, to the nearby home of a family member, driving on country roads with no helmets, unaware they were being staked out by Gillis and O’Neill, both established paparazzi who had shot them before.

Gomez drove on the way out, but Bieber drove on the way back, and spotted the photographers parked in a driveway up ahead as he approached his own driveway. He drove at them, colliding with the front right side of their Dodge Grand Caravan. It was impossible for police to determine where exactly the impact occurred, whether on or off the highway, but there was evidence that the van, previously parked, had been moving forward at the moment of impact.

No one was hurt. Bieber then confronted the men, first assaulting Gillis and then approaching O’Neill before O’Neill, the driver, backed up, manoeuvred around the ATV, and drove away.

Bieber “was disappointed with the invasion of privacy,” Greenspan said. “It was disturbing to him, obviously, and triggered a response, for which he feels guilty.”

Greenspan tried to describe the “sincere affection” that was shown to Bieber at his recent televised roast, as a reason the judge should accept the plea deal, but Judge McKerlie interrupted him and suggested this was not helpful.

There should be laws against what I just experienced. We should have learned from the death of Princess Diana...

In its landmark report on Tuesday, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission lays out a litany of appalling historical facts and one highly controversial conclusion: that Canada perpetrated a kind of genocide on its First Nations.

“Cultural genocide is the destruction of those structures and practices that allow the group to continue as a group,” the report reads. “States that engage in cultural genocide set out to destroy the political and social institutions of the targeted group. Land is seized, and populations are forcibly transferred and their movement is restricted. Languages are banned. Spiritual leaders are persecuted, spiritual practices are forbidden, and objects of spiritual value are conﬁscated and destroyed. And, most signiﬁcantly to the issue at hand, families are disrupted to prevent the transmission of cultural values and identity from one generation to the next.

“In its dealing with Aboriginal people,” the report states, “Canada did all these things.”

There is discomfort with the term “cultural genocide,” and not just because it seems to put Canada in a hall of shame with Germany, Rwanda, Turkey, and others. Nor just because it may have legal consequences.

Mainly, it is because the term seems to get to genocide, the most fearsome crime of all, by skipping over deliberate mass murder.

Residential schools, after all, were schools, not death camps or killing fields.

Unease with the term “cultural genocide” is nothing new. In fact, the debate over it is as old as the idea of genocide itself, and its history reveals the dramatic lengths to which Canada has gone to undermine the very idea of a First Nations genocide.

Before the report was released, Canada’s Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin lent her support to the term in a public lecture. “Indianness was not to be tolerated, rather it must be eliminated,” she said of past government policy.

The idea of irreparable cultural destruction is gaining new urgency as ISIL continues its iconoclastic rampage through the great antiquities of Syria. Its new use in Canada, however, in a country widely seen as a model of applied human rights, is likely to return “cultural genocide” to the global vernacular.

The term was coined simultaneously to “genocide” proper, in 1944, when the late Polish American jurist Raphael Lemkin published Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.

“Genocide has two phases,” Lemkin wrote. “One, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.”

The idea of cultural genocide, or ethnocide, reflected Lemkin’s view that genocide is not simply mass murder.

Claudia Card, an American philosopher, used the term “social death” for the effect of cultural genocide: “The special evil of genocide lies in its infliction of not just physical death (when it does that) but social death, producing a consequent meaninglessness of one’s life and even of its termination.”

Anglican Church ArchivesResidential school children sit in a typical classroom, in this undated photo.

Israel Charny editor of Encyclopedia of Genocide, is among those who have objected to this view, preferring to reserve the word for cases involving mass killing. On that view, genocide might have cultural dimensions, but at root it is about physical extermination of a race.

These were the ideological battle lines as the Second World War wound down, and the United Nations set about drafting a convention on genocide.

An early draft included cultural genocide, which was supported by Soviet Bloc countries but opposed by Western Europe.

In the end, the term was excluded, as was protection for political groups, but vestiges remain in the convention, including the forced removal of children.

Canada ratified the convention, but from the start it was apparent that residential schools could fall afoul of the ban on forcible transfer of children to another group.

As Canadian genocide scholar Adam Jones described it in his 2006 book Genocide, Canada “dodged” this problem by quietly amending its domestic enforcement law, in effect taking a two-faced approach on genocide, condemning it abroad even as it arguably perpetrated it at home, right up until 1996, when the last residential school closed outside Regina.

The government line at the time was that parts of the Genocide Convention were “intended to cover certain historical incidents in Europe that have little essential relevance in Canada.” Mass transfers of children to another group, the government claimed, were “unknown” in Canada.

Jones, a professor at the University of British Columbia, calls this a “bald-faced lie,” and said Canada’s amended statute was “a mask for the fact that Canada was consciously committing genocide, and had every intention of continuing to do so.”

Residential schools were not death camps, but there were thousands of deaths. Children were buried in unmarked graves, without even the dignity of proper record keeping.

In his reflections on the “collective pathological narcissism” by which modern nations can deny their own self-evident acts of evil, Jones cites the comedian Rob Corddry on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, who memorably defended American war crimes at Abu Ghraib like this: “Remember. Just because torturing prisoners is something we did, doesn’t mean it’s something we would do.”

TORONTO — An Ottawa abortion doctor who kept his clinic in an old downtown house so cluttered and unhygienic that two dozen patients were put at grave risk of infection, and whose practices were so bad he sent anesthesized women home alone in taxis, has agreed to leave medicine forever rather than fight Ontario’s medical regulator for his licence.

Wee Lim Sim, who has also worked at a clinic in Montreal, is already well past retirement age, and appeared frail Tuesday at his discipline hearing, shuffling around in winter boots.

He agreed to resign from the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons, and never re-apply, after admitting to professional misconduct. A charge of incompetence was withdrawn as part of the plea deal.

In their reprimand, members of the College’s discipline committee said it is “disheartening” to see a physician kicked out of the profession at the end of a “valued career, especially so when that career has been in an area which has provided controversy, conflict and even threats of harm to its practitioners and which has provided help for women, often in extremely vulnerable an distressing circumstances.”

The committee went on to “roundly condemn” his ineffective infection control, improper delegation to his staff, poor record keeping, and rude, aggressive style of communication.

‘If you do not keep quiet, your surgery will be cancelled and you will have to go to another doctor’

For example, he had a form letter for patients that read: “If you do not keep quiet, your surgery will be cancelled and you will have to go to another doctor.

“This is totally unprofessional,” said Lisa Spiegel, senior counsel for the CPSO.

Sim’s only response to the reprimand was “Thank you sir.” Outside the hearing room, however, he was flippant and dismissive of the misconduct to which he had just admitted.

“I did a few things not according to the standards of the College,” he said. “With enough skill and experience you can do without many of those things.”

He said he looks forward to enjoying the rest of his life, and declined to give his age. “You are as old as you think you are,” he said.